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Azure Container Instances

azure.microsoft.com

31–40 of 117 posts

Re: Azure Container Instances

#31
post #14

Companies like Hyper [1] should be put on notice. This is a surprisingly unique product. AWS ECS and GKE both require some form of management of the underlying VM. A lot of that management is abstracted away, but not in the same way this is. That being said, pricing [2] seems odd. At $0.0000125/GB_Second and $0.001/Core_Second, lets say you want to replicate an Azure A3 instance (4core/7gb/$130). That would cost... o…

It seems to me like it's supposed to be a more flexible, versatile equivalent of AWS Lambda: fired up for a quick operation based on some trigger, then immediately shut down. From that perspective the pricing doesn't seem too bad.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#32

Does anyone know what service discovery, network security policy and ability to add multiple redundant copies of the same service this offers? I'm guessing it's powered heavily by kubernetes, so maybe that answers the question, but I'd be interested to know more about the details.

ACI lets you schedule individual containers (technically container groups, which are equivalent to K8s pods). Everything on top of that - scaling, service discovery, rolling upgrades, etc. - is up to you. That's why we think the Kubernetes connector [1] is interesting:

[1]: https://github.com/azure/aci-connector-k8s

Re: Azure Container Instances

#34
I find it funny to see containers landing in Windows. While I fully approve the containers on Linux, to me it looks like Windows does not really need them: it already has a stable notion of executable files with full binary compatibility. An old but gold EXE format is your container. Please excuse my probable naivety, but am I missing something?

Re: Azure Container Instances

#36

So, are we just now using “serverless” to just mean “dynamically scalable” the same way that “cloud” used to? Because, previously, “serverless” seemed to mean not needing to deal with anything lower-level infrastructure than function calls (that is, a higher level of abstraction than even a classical PaaS like GAE managed runtimes), while container hosting, dynamically scalable or not, is somewhere between classic Ia…

And both seems wrong to me. Serverless would be without server, not with an "intermittent" server. Serverless should design architectures without server processing per request (like jekyll compared to wordpress).

Re: Azure Container Instances

#37
post #14

Companies like Hyper [1] should be put on notice. This is a surprisingly unique product. AWS ECS and GKE both require some form of management of the underlying VM. A lot of that management is abstracted away, but not in the same way this is. That being said, pricing [2] seems odd. At $0.0000125/GB_Second and $0.001/Core_Second, lets say you want to replicate an Azure A3 instance (4core/7gb/$130). That would cost... o…

The core second price at the top is incorrect. The per-second prices for cores and GBs are the same: $0.0000125. We are getting that fixed now.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#38

I find it funny to see containers landing in Windows. While I fully approve the containers on Linux, to me it looks like Windows does not really need them: it already has a stable notion of executable files with full binary compatibility. An old but gold EXE format is your container. Please excuse my probable naivety, but am I missing something?

Containers are not just about providing stable executable files, but consistent and reproducible environments. Besides, having a unified way of deploying both linux, windows or any other OS seems like a win-win since your backend (docker, or whatever container runtime you use) would remain the same.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#39
post #14

Companies like Hyper [1] should be put on notice. This is a surprisingly unique product. AWS ECS and GKE both require some form of management of the underlying VM. A lot of that management is abstracted away, but not in the same way this is. That being said, pricing [2] seems odd. At $0.0000125/GB_Second and $0.001/Core_Second, lets say you want to replicate an Azure A3 instance (4core/7gb/$130). That would cost... o…

[deleted]

Re: Azure Container Instances

#40

I find it funny to see containers landing in Windows. While I fully approve the containers on Linux, to me it looks like Windows does not really need them: it already has a stable notion of executable files with full binary compatibility. An old but gold EXE format is your container. Please excuse my probable naivety, but am I missing something?

Your old but gold EXE still has access to system registry and files. It also commonly requires a lot of DLLs and configuration files next to it.

A container has all the dependencies contained and has a private set of files and registry.

So no installation and no-side effects.

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